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The candle flame gutters

I’ve been blogging for a year now here at missing sparkles. It started as a small group of us, each presenting our own views, opinions and discussing what we each saw as important issues within the queer community, the greater social environment (I was going to use the word milieu, but I don’t want to look like a wanker) and the intermingling thereof.

However, our numbers quickly dwindled, some before we even started, as each individual author found themselves too busy, usually engaged in the sisyphean endeavour known as the PhD.

Before long, there was only me. With my idealistic cynicism, loving disrespect for politicians, affable polemic, and occasional use of naughty words. Words like fuck, for example.

After the others left to pursue academic titles and post nominals I entertained the notion that I would find replacements and other people to cover the wide gamut of queer identities, but for various reasons they never manifested — typically because those I found who were interested were themselves too busy doing other things, and those who were free were already blogging or writing in their own spheres.

So it was just me.

I had never intended to stay with missing sparkles forever, but I thought I would be here for a long time. I’ve been planning to finish up here for a while, but now a series of events has hastened my departure.

I written before of my mental illness — I’ve never been shy about being public about it — and it’s affected my blogging here in the past. But now it’s come racing back and caught me blind in a dark cul de sac, it’s black robes fluttering around me as it drags my optimism into the darkness of shame and despair.

The other issues hastening my departure are as complicated as they are my own.

It’s a shame to see this blog end. I built up a nice little audience, got myself into a few intellectual scuffles, had endless fun with Tau Henare, and ended up pissing off some of my friends.

I will return before too long, but not here. Maybe not even as Mr Wainscotting, though I am quite attached to the identity. I’ve always felt an affinity with the phoenix — in a purely symbolic sense, of course — and I will rise again, with a new blog where I can write about a greater range of issues (perhaps not with the same grandiosity as the legendary bird, but a boy can dream).

Many years ago, when I was at my lowest, I purchased a book that gave me a perspective that brought me back from the brink. That book is Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Being dyslexic, books have to be very interesting for me to be able to read them, and Sagan never fails to disappoint. I almost never read fiction books — I get my escapism from daydreams and cinema. It is in non-fiction that I find most pleasure and in the realms of science and particularly astronomy that I find my perspective.